Opinion: People, not technology, are responsible for computer glitches

They’re obviously human errors, but we pass them off as ‘systems malfunctions’

Larry Kofsky/MarketWatch

By

ArtZeile

It’s stunning that the New York Stock Exchange could be offline for three hours, and that United Airlines could somehow also leave travelers stranded, many for more hours than that, on the same day due to internal-systems malfunctions.

With a third highly public belly-flop performed by the Wall Street Journal’s Web site on the same day, all following an ominous message earlier from a Twitter account linked to the hacker group Anonymous, conspiracy theories were bound to run riot. And they did.

But if we take at face value the reports that these systems were not hacked, I can only ask: How did it happen?

Yes, technology systems fail. But in 2015, those systems can also be tested, data migrations performed flawlessly, and layers of redundancy built in. All of which requires hard work, planning and skilled personnel, which, yes, gets expensive. But in my opinion, when a platform or a company as large and as vital as the NYSE or United Airlines — or even the Wall Street Journal — is unable to operate for hours at a time because of a glitch, it suggests someone might be cutting corners.

Clearly, technical problems in financial markets are nothing new. We’ve seen the flash crash in 2010, the delay of the Facebook IPO in 2012 and that time in 2011 when the Toronto Stock Exchange couldn’t process trades in tickers that started with the letters M-Z.

Anyone else old enough to remember back in 1987 when the Nasdaq’s over-the-counter trading was halted for hours because a squirrel touched off a power failure in suburban Connecticut, frying the poor squirrel and subsequently creating a power surge that disabled the Nasdaq’s mainframes?

We are well past the point where it’s enough to blame a squirrel in Connecticut for a major disruption to financial markets or air travel. We have entered an era where technology has become so foundational to our economy and our society that it’s no longer enough to say it was “a coding error” and call it a day.

How are we going to depend on technology to drive us around in our cars, land our planes, keep our nukes, Social Security numbers and medical histories safe if even the NYSE might be cutting corners?

Everyone involved needs to be honest — and if they want to maintain the public’s trust — transparent, about the controls that were in place, or more likely the lack thereof. And then their leadership needs to be taken to task for why the time, money and partners weren’t in place to do it right the first time.

Art Zeile is the founder and CEO of Hosting, a Denver-based managed-cloud-services firm. Follow him @artzeile and via his company.

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